The Ninth Time

[egypturnash]

The Ninth Time

Some kid on Deviantart was asking "how do I do this kind of glowy vector effect?". I hazarded a guess and then pulled out a random piece of sketchbook to play around with and found out I was pretty much right.

Please pardon the WEB TWO DOT OH background stuff. Distorting the wallpapery pattern makes it much more interesting, I think.

(ps: this was about three hours work, according to the file dates. stuff like this has gotten way too easy; this is why I challenge myself with things like those spiders...)

Comments

[jmj20320514.livejournal.com]

This is beautifully surreal. The colors and the hair really grab me.

[yaochi.livejournal.com]

Ooooooooh !

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

glowy effect aside, outline and color sense love!
<3

[amoux.livejournal.com]

Oh... oh, wow. Gorgeous.

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

Oh, so lovely. She's so sleek with those lines coming out of her head...

[mutleyjames.livejournal.com]

Beautiful! Excellent contrast and totally electrifyling!

[barberio.livejournal.com]

Very nice, but something feels just a tad hinky about the head crest lines thingy. They have depth where they're touching the head, but at the top of the picture they feel flat.

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

i thought that was the point

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yes. It's sort of the point.

[dustmeat.livejournal.com]

Swanktastic!

[waywind.livejournal.com]

Wow.

[robocoon.livejournal.com]

this reminds me of that tiger that Neogeen just drew, which reminded me of Shodan. :0

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It all converges, somehow. I was thinking of some pulpy British sci-fi art, and realized after doing the original sketch that I was also riffing on some of the wilder variants of the owl logo for the nineties computer game company Psygnosis. (sadly I couldn't find any scans of this online; it was, like, inside box art and people only scan covers...)

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Ooh, fancy. But I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean by "WEB TWO DOT OH background stuff". Perhaps I missed something!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It's not as common as "white or black with reflections", but ray patterns and wallpapery backdrops are something I feel is getting to be really overused these days.

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Ray patterns? I'm guilty. They make a ridiculously cheery background for flags. :)

[mythos-amante.livejournal.com]

I really like that, Peggy!

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

I'm not only envious of your ability to 'hazard a guess' and come up with such a wonderful glowy effect, but of the great sense of texture you've made of the background. It -feels- like paper. One of the least vectory things I've seen you do. This one's a subtler masterpiece.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It's amazing what a 50% grey rectangle with 'mezzotint' applied, brought down to 5% opacity with one of the 'light' composite modes will do!

well, that and a lot of other transparency tricks - big shapes with simple gradient opacity masks, overlaid on each other, and a lot of the foreground shapes also being transparent so they pick up the texture and some of the color below them...

As I experiment with this sort of thing, I'm continually surprised by how simple little things add up, and completely fail to look "filtery". Maybe it's because I'm using a couple of different things, subtly, rather than going "HEY LOOK! LENS FLARE!".

[luoto.livejournal.com]

Angry godess!
This one is truly amazing!

wow

[eselgeist.livejournal.com]

i'd say it's perfect, really :)